‘Oh, the singing, yes. Since Herr Wengel sorted my breathing for me, I do know how I have come on. I wish we would hear from him, or about him. The thing is, Martha, I need to get on to a stage. You know as well as I do that it’s not just singing that makes an opera. It must be acted, too. And there’s a limit to the amount that one can study by oneself. But there’s another reason why I long to hear from Herr Wengel. This Congress sitting at Rastatt. I hadn’t realised, but Mr. Lodge said something the other day about how many small German principalities are going to vanish without trace. Martha, it’s horribly selfish of me, but I couldn’t help thinking of Lissenberg. Suppose it gets swallowed up by one of its neighbours, Baden or Württemberg?’
‘From everything I’ve heard, it would serve Prince Gustav richly right.’
‘That’s no comfort to me,’ said Cristabel.
‘Never mind.’ Martha was disconcerted to realise how much her friend had been counting on Franz Wengel’s casual proposal. ‘If the peace just holds I am sure you can do better than the small tyrannical court at Lissenberg. Why not La Scala? Or the San Carlo? I confess I sometimes find myself wishing we had gone to Naples as Helen suggested.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Cristabel. ‘Then I wouldn’t have met Mama.’
* * *
Salomon Rothschild paid Martha one of his rare visits a few days later. As always he contrived to find her alone, and she was more and more convinced that he actually owned the house where they had their apartments, and probably the servants too. It was odd how little she minded, and another of the things she had not mentioned to Cristabel or Helen.
She greeted him now like the business friend she felt him to be. As usual, he refused her offer of refreshment and came straight to the point. ‘I have a piece of news that I think will please you, Miss Peabody.’ He sat on the edge of his chair, neat and inconspicuous in his habitual black, a bulging brief-case under his arm. ‘You know, I am sure, about the Congress at Rastatt?’
‘Yes?’ She liked him for the assumption.
‘You will be pleased to hear that they have decided to leave Lissenberg out of their discussions. Prince Gustav will be able to celebrate his twenty-fifth anniversary after all.’
‘That’s good news,’ she said, ‘but surprising. I thought Lissenberg just the kind of small principality that was bound to be lost.’
‘Quite true. But it also serves a very useful financial purpose just as it is. So – by some curious chance its name got left out of the original draft for discussion.’
‘And nobody noticed?’
‘Nobody mentioned it.’ He picked up his brief-case, then rose. ‘You don’t plan to leave Venice, I hope, when war breaks out.’
‘It’s going to?’ Startled.
‘Quite soon, I think. And my advice, if you will allow me to give it, is that your party stay here. Don’t think of trying to get home to England. I am leaving for Vienna in the morning. Can I count on finding you here when I return?’
‘The news is as bad as the weather.’ Dominic Playfair shook March raindrops out of his hair. ‘I’m afraid it begins to look very much like war, Miss Peabody. I’m told on the very best authority that Bonaparte has made one of his scenes with Whitworth, the British Ambassador. Deliberately provocative. We British will never take it lying down. But there must be a little time before it actually comes to blows. I came to you at once, in case you and the other ladies thought you should make haste for home.’
‘Do you think we should?’
‘I would hesitate to counsel so wise a young lady, but, just the same … Venice is a volcano, Miss Peabody, which might erupt any day.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Miss Peabody, I know it. The Austrian occupiers keep the lid screwed down tight, but underneath there is a seething mess ready to boil over. If Austria throws in her lot with us against France, the Venetians may well think their moment has come. There is hot blood stirring. I would not wish you ladies to be here when the day of vengeance comes. Though of course I should be desolated to see you go.’ With a languishing glance.
She laughed and shook her head at him. ‘What a waste of a pretty speech, Mr. Playfair. Save it, please, for when we are in company. Did you notice the man in the snuff-coloured suit at the opera last night, by the way? I thought he was keeping a very close eye on you.’
‘On all of us.’ He did not attempt to deny it. ‘But I did hope you had not noticed. Did Lady Cristabel?’
‘I doubt it. She was totally absorbed in the performance, as usual. I certainly hope not. She has enough on her mind as it is, without being troubled with your conspiracies. I rather wish I knew how far her mother is involved. Is it with her knowledge – and the Count’s – that you use her house as your meeting-place? No,’ she threw out a hand, ‘don’t tell me. On second thoughts, I believe I would rather not know. And besides,’ she paused, thinking about it, ‘it is obvious that what I have noticed, the Signora and the Count will have noticed too. My only concern is to keep Lady Cristabel out of it. Why are you laughing?’
‘With admiration, Miss Peabody, for your singleness of mind. Venice can rot in chains, so far as you are concerned, as long as your friend becomes a prima donna?’
‘The chains don’t seem so dreadful to me. And richly earned! Frankly, I think the Venetians need to learn how to use liberty before they are entitled to demand it. Maybe a few years of bondage will make for a more humane society in the end. I have had it on my mind to suggest to you that you were taking great risks – for yourself and other people – for a cause you do not sufficiently understand.’
‘The cause of freedom? How can you say so, Miss Peabody?’ He laughed ruefully. ‘But I am sorry to have been so transparent. Our snuff-coloured friend was a warning to me as well as to you – I’m just sorry you noticed him too. If I promise to be more careful in future, will you allow me to remain your devoted servant?’
‘Oh, I think so. In other respects, you suit me very well. It would be tedious to have to replace you. And might be a little awkward for you to be seen to be replaced.’
‘Extremely so! Miss Peabody, what a conspirator you would make. If only you would join us! Now you are laughing at me!’
‘Not really. I was only thinking how pleasant it is to be asked to join a madcap plot, instead of having marriage proposed to me.’
‘You make me want to do that too!’
‘Nonsense.’ She turned as Cristabel and Lodge joined them from the music-room. ‘Just in time! Mr. Playfair was threatening to propose marriage!’
‘An admirable idea,’ said Barham Lodge. ‘A joint wedding? St. Mark’s perhaps? Gondolas for four down the Grand Canal –’
‘Così Fan’ Tutte –’ Cristabel interrupted him. ‘And if we are not to miss the overture, it is time we were going.’
‘Music first, last and all the time.’ Lodge helped her into the voluminous black cape worn by ladies in the evening.
Cristabel had made it clear, from her first appearance in a Venetian theatre, that she went for the music, not to entertain her friends, and now, no one disturbed them while the opera was being performed. But when tumultuous applause greeted the sweep of velvet curtains, and the audience relaxed for the afterpiece, she and Martha prepared to hold court in their box, while the two young men went off to make some calls of their own. They returned sooner than usual, ushering a tall, dark-haired stranger.
‘Lady Cristabel, Miss Peabody,’ Playfair was at his most formal, ‘may I present –’
Cristabel’s gilt chair overturned as she rose, dropping gloves and opera glasses. ‘Max –’ She held out both hands, stopped, coloured, curtsied. ‘I mean –’
‘You mean Max.’ He took her hands, kissed them one after the other, held them for a moment, looking at her. ‘It never struck me you would be beautiful,’ he said at last. ‘It’s better than I dreamed.’
‘Better? But I’m forgetting my manners. May I present you to my dear friend, Miss Peabody. Prince Maximilia
n of Lissenberg, Martha. My childhood friend.’
‘Highness.’ Curtsying.
‘No, no. I am not here at all as a prince. I am simply my father’s musical emissary, and very happy to be so.’ He turned back to Cristabel. ‘Prince Gustav took one of his dislikes to his German Opera Company this winter. He has sent the lot of them packing, I’m sorry to say – some of them were my good friends – but there is no arguing with my father, as I am sure you will remember. And at least it means that I have the happy task of finding him Italian replacements for next season.’
‘A whole new company?’
‘Precisely. I thought I would begin here in Venice because here I shall have the benefit of your advice. But the orchestra is tuning up. I must get back to my place. May I call on you tomorrow, Lady Cristabel, and talk about old times and my new project?’
‘We will look forward to it. And I promise to smother you in good advice.’
That night, Martha was surprised by a long, highly-coloured and alarmingly erotic dream of Franz Wengel. She woke angry with herself and baffled at what had put him into her mind.
Cristabel had talked about possible singers for Lissenberg all the way home, and now returned from her music lesson full of it. ‘Arioso is going to make me a list of singers,’ she told Martha and Helen over coffee and rolls. ‘What do you think Max meant about my being beautiful and it’s better than he dreamed?’
‘You had better ask the Prince when he calls,’ said Lady Helen. ‘And, Cristabel, I do think you should cure yourself, at once, of this habit of calling him Max. It really will not do, now that you are grown up.’
‘No! Of course not. But, you see, he hasn’t changed a bit. I feel just as if I had known him always. Do you think he will tell us, today, about the plans for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his father’s arrival in Lissenberg?’
‘Purchase of it?’ asked Martha. ‘I suppose if there is really to be a specially commissioned opera for it next autumn, they will need to get a company built up quickly.’
‘I should just about think they will,’ Cristabel smiled to herself, ‘I wonder if Prince Maximilian knows about Franz Wengel? We must ask him when he comes.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Martha. ‘Wengel comes from the wrong end of the country, remember.’
‘But the country is tiny. About the size of Wales, I’d think, and just as mountainous. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of communication between the capital and Brundt where the mines are, except when it came to taxes, of course.’
‘But Wengel spoke as if he had influence, knew people in Lissenberg. I don’t suppose there’s much music, or much influence, at Brundt.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Cristabel. ‘They all seem to be musical in Lissenberg. It’s going to be a terrible slap in the face to have an Italian opera company thrust upon them. I wonder how the little prince is,’ she went on thoughtfully. ‘Herr Wengel never seemed to think he had much chance of surviving, but if Prince Maximilian is here as his father’s musical representative …’
‘The baby must be thriving.’
Prince Maximilian confirmed this when he called early, by arrangement. ‘Yes, he’s beginning to outgrow the ailments of his infancy, I’m glad to say, our little Prince Gustav the Second. I cannot begin to tell you what a liberation it has been for me, Lady Cristabel.’ Smiling at her. ‘How I wish I could call you Bella, as I used to, but it won’t do, and we must resign ourselves.’
‘Just what my aunt was saying. But I shall always remember my friend Max who gave me my chance as a singer.’
‘And I, how you took it. I long to hear you sing. There has been talk about you even in remote Lissenberg and that is something else I want to tell you about.’ And he plunged into a description of his father’s plans for his twenty-fifth anniversary. ‘The little prince will be five next year, over the worst of the hazards of childhood. We will be celebrating that too.’
‘You really don’t mind?’
‘Mind? I should think not. I cannot think of anyone less suitable than I am to rule Lissenberg, and not many people who want to less. My ambition is quite other, nearer to yours. I want to write opera. Not just the music, the words too. Imagine if Mozart could have written his own libretti!’
‘You don’t want to sing?’ asked Cristabel.
‘I’ve hardly done so, since my voice broke. One of my father’s many prohibitions. Or at least, only in private, but I let myself think that if I go in for the competition for the festival opera, next year, under an alias, of course, and win, he will find it in his heart to forgive me. Success has always appealed to Prince Gustav. I think part of why he was so angry all those years ago, was because it was you, not I, who held the audience in the palm of your hand. And you can still do it, I hear. So – when am I to hear you sing?’
‘Now?’ suggested Martha. ‘I’d be happy to play for you, Cristabel.’
‘Get it over with? Why not.’ They moved into the music-room. ‘What shall I sing for you?’
‘Orpheus, please. I remember it so well, have never heard it sung better.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve glamorised me in my absence,’ she said. ‘I’ll never live up to it.’
They were beginning to talk, already, like old friends, Martha noticed. She sat down at the piano. ‘The first lament?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please. And then I’ll go straight on to ‘Che farò’, and you will not say a word, Prince Maximilian, until I finish.’
‘Your obedient servant.’
Most unusually, Cristabel was nervous. It showed at first, and Martha understood why she had wanted no break between the two laments. It was only with the opening words of ‘Che faro’ that she began to sing as Martha knew she could.
‘Yes,’ Prince Maximilian said at last, ‘Most absolutely, yes. So, what is the opera to be? And are you to sing hero, or heroine, Lady Cristabel?’
‘You ask us?’ Martha was amazed.
‘Why not? To tell you the truth, I have had to revise all my ideas since I reached Venice. Don’t be angry with me, Lady Cristabel, but for some reason I had remembered you as a plain child. I had been thinking of subjects where character would outweigh looks. And now I find you a great beauty, I have to start my thinking all over again.’
‘That’s what you meant last night.’ Cristabel laughed. ‘I do apologise for inconveniencing you. But what had you in mind for me?’
‘I had thought of Cassandra, perhaps, the unlucky prophetess, and the triumph of the Greeks. There will have to be some element of royal triumph in our theme, or what hope of winning the competition?’
‘I can see that,’ said Martha. ‘But, surely Agamemnon is not the happiest subject? He came to a bad enough end, poor man, murdered by his wife when he returned home.’
‘You think I might be putting ideas into my stepmother’s head?’ He looked at her with new respect. ‘Dear Miss Peabody, do, I beg you, think of a better subject for me?’
‘You intend a classical one?’
‘I think so. Something along the lines of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito, a great favourite of mine – and of my father’s.’
‘But Idomeneo, perhaps, a more interesting model?’
‘Dear me, no. A more interesting opera, yes, of course. But you are forgetting, Miss Peabody, that in Idomeneo the young heirs take over the country. It would hardly be considered tactful.’
She laughed. ‘Stupid of me. Would Il Re Pastore be more the thing?’
‘Very much so. I’m sure my father would like to see himself as Alexander the Great. But not an interesting subject.’ He was on his feet, riffling through the manuscript music that lay on the fortepiano. ‘A king who sacrifices himself for his people? The king who must die? No, my father would not like that at all. Self-sacrifice was never his line.’
‘Persephone?’ suggested Martha. ‘A delicate tribute to your stepmother?’
‘And who would I sing?’ asked Cristabel. ‘Persephone herself, or Pluto who carries her off, or
Hermes who rescues her?’
‘None of them, I think,’ said Maximilian. ‘There’s not enough to it, and, besides, I believe Paisiello is at work on the theme at this very moment. Alceste, maybe?’
‘The king doesn’t come out very well in that either,’ said Martha.
‘Interesting about kings, is it not? They do tend not to come out very well. Sacrificing their daughters, letting their wives sacrifice themselves for them. It’s quite enough to put a man off the whole business.’
‘Oh, Max,’ said Cristabel impulsively. ‘It is so good to see you again! But, tell me, truly, what did you think of my singing?’
‘I thought you very nervous, and was flattered. And what is this trouble you have been having with your breathing?’
‘You noticed?’ Delighted. ‘Oh, such a story, such a drama. Do you know Herr Franz Wengel? He comes from Lissenberg.’
‘I’ve heard the name. A man active both in music and in politics?’
‘That’s the one. He came to see us in Paris. I should warn you, he means to write an opera for the competition too, and it will be a good one. And – God bless him – the first time he heard me, he told me I’d lose my voice if I didn’t change my breathing. And taught me how. It’s the strangest thing; I’ve been breath-perfect ever since, until I sang for you today. You heard?’
‘Of course I heard. And heard the difference when you got it under control. A clever man, this Wengel, I must look out for him when I get back to Lissenberg. He’s going in for the competition, too, you say? What’s his subject?’
‘He’s like you, finding it hard to choose one.’
6
May, and the canals were beginning to smell. ‘High time we moved to the country,’ said Signora Aldini. ‘You’ll stay with me, of course.’
‘All three of us?’ asked Cristabel.
‘Naturally. And Signor Arioso, too, so you can continue your studies while you wait to hear from Prince Maximilian. It is all of the highest respectability,’ turning to Martha, ‘Count Tafur and I have adjacent villas on the Brenta. And, frankly, I think it would be best for you two to get out of town, and leave your hot-headed young cavaliers behind.’
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